National Archives

FO's fight over Mugabe's wife

The Foreign Office intervened repeatedly - but ultimately unsuccessfully - to prevent the Home Office deporting Robert Mugabe's first wife, according to papers released to the National Archives.

Sarah (also known as Sally) Mugabe, a Ghanaian by birth, had come to London in 1967 to train as a teacher but stayed to work because she could not return to what was then Rhodesia where her husband had been in prison for six years and she was wanted for nationalist activity.

The Home Office wrote to her in late 1969 warning that she must leave by the end of the year. A junior Foreign Office minister, Maurice Foley, took up her cause, writing to Merlyn Rees at the Home Office. "There may be cases of people who are not strictly political refugees who would not qualify to enter or remain in the UK ... but who have no other country to return to. I would like to be reassured that such cases receive especially sympathetic treatment."

Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia, which had unilaterally declared independence several years earlier, was not formally recognised by the UK government. Mr Rees was unmoved. He wrote back: "Mrs Mugabe's connections with Rhodesia are only through her husband and they do not appear to have any real strength."